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The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#91

Post by devmunchies »

hourislate wrote: post #89

Just imagine how much Glyphosate has been dumped on that soil. Don't know if it's true but someone once told me nothing will grow in a corn field for 5 years afterwards unless it is roundup ready. There has been a lot of talk lately we are like 60 harvests away from disaster. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-... *Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years* We are f...ed the…

i see neighbors using Glyphosate all the time. don't know how its even still sold in stores.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#93

Post by devmunchies »

titzer wrote: post #37
gumby wrote: post #2

Modern farming is not the bucolic system drawn on the food packages in the supermarket. It's an extractive industry little different from mining or oil drilling. In fact industrial food is largely eating oil, both in energy intensity itself and the use of oil as feedstock for fertilizers and food additives.

I come from a long line of farmers. My father was the last of our family to try to hold onto the farming tradition. He grew up on a farm, along with all my aunts and uncles. His generation was the first go to college. He chose business. He made a ton of money, and hated it. After leaving the business world in the mid 1980s to return to farming, it was not the same, and he soon returned to what was effectively day tra…

> globalization

this is it right here. we're extracting all nutrients from a concentrated area and sending the yields far away. There's no replenishment.

Even the water shortages in California is not as simple as "farmers are using all the water". It's the demand for food far, far away.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#94

Post by giantg2 »

hourislate wrote: post #89

Just imagine how much Glyphosate has been dumped on that soil. Don't know if it's true but someone once told me nothing will grow in a corn field for 5 years afterwards unless it is roundup ready. There has been a lot of talk lately we are like 60 harvests away from disaster. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-... *Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years* We are f...ed the…

I believe it takes 4 years after the end of applications before it can be certified organic. Stuff will grow the following year or so. I think the half life is 90 days. Plus farmers have to pay for the chemicals they spray and try to apply the right amount since over application would cost more. So it should resolve itself fairly fast.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#95

Post by carapace »

It doesn't have to be this way.

E.g. "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A

Regenerative agriculture is profitable (Brown makes money) and build soil volume and fertility year on year.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#96

Post by ta988 »

devmunchies wrote: post #91
hourislate wrote: post #89

Just imagine how much Glyphosate has been dumped on that soil. Don't know if it's true but someone once told me nothing will grow in a corn field for 5 years afterwards unless it is roundup ready. There has been a lot of talk lately we are like 60 harvests away from disaster. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-... *Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years* We are f...ed the…

i see neighbors using Glyphosate all the time. don't know how its even still sold in stores.

Really simple. Heavy lobying and no public opposition.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#97

Post by activehuman »

To me this is just another example of how humanity often doesn't think and act for the long term until its too late- along with the problems of our poor planning for climate change, pandemics, plastic pollution, and consistently choosing to invest in shiny new things versus investing in maintaining current infrastructure.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#98

Post by briga »

seiferteric wrote: post #79
briga wrote: post #25

It's a shame we don't have satellite imagery dating back to when Europeans first arrived on the continent. I suspect the whole western US was once far more lush and green than it is today. The central valley in California, for example, used to have several natural lakes. Who knows how much impact the damming the Colorado river has on the ecology of the southwestern deserts. I can't imagine that concentrating water in…

I have heard that the creeks in the central valley used to run most/all of the year because the water table was practically at the surface. This also allowed for the healthy salmon runs we used to have. Now all the creeks are dry by early/mid summer.

That's true in silicon valley too, I remember seeing fish drowning in tiny pools of water because the creeks dry up so much. The floodplain of the san francisco bay has just been so heavily developed that there's just not enough water to go around.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#99

Post by bluGill »

hourislate wrote: post #89

Just imagine how much Glyphosate has been dumped on that soil. Don't know if it's true but someone once told me nothing will grow in a corn field for 5 years afterwards unless it is roundup ready. There has been a lot of talk lately we are like 60 harvests away from disaster. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-... *Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years* We are f...ed the…

Instead of repeating lies you can look this up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate half life is between 4 and 197 days.

Glyphosate binds strongly to soil, so even when there is glyphosate in the soil it doesn't affect seeds in the ground but not growing yet.

Re: The U.S. corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

#100

Post by TaylorAlexander »

hinkley wrote: post #46
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #20

If anyone is curious I am working on an open source farming robot meant to be used for regenerative agriculture techniques. My hope is that we can build robotic tools that work the land more like human hands do instead of the big tools and poisons we use today. If you like that kind of thing please take a look: https://community.twistedfields.com/t/introducing-acorn-a-pr...

On the plus side, your rover is going to work better with contour planting, which is part of the solution to our problems. The downside is that most of the post-modern agricultural variants embrace observation as being critical, and we of all people should know that statistics and graphs are not a substitute for actually looking at things. Having a robot phone home is not the same as knowing what's going on. As an as…

Thanks!

Yes I do dream of contours cut all through a town where small robots can tend to locally grown food. And of course for large farms it’s still a help if there are any hills.

Having people on the ground is very important. Sometimes in my mind I imagine a fully automated farm but I try to push back against myself and think more of how this can be a tool to help people do their work. For observation I do want to be able to provide high resolution images stitched together and geolocated so that a record of observations is available for review now and for posterity. There’s no substitute for walking the field and observing with human eyes. Bending down and looking close. Picking a leaf, breaking it open, and smelling it. I do think we will need great optics and high resolution imagers, plus a high res imager on an arm for detailed remote views. I do want to teach these machines to do some diagnosis on their own. But ultimately this will be a tool to aid a farmer, not replace them.

I have a new video coming soon that shows our replacement drive system. You’re right that the system shown in that video was susceptible to mud. The new system has operated for weeks in the rain and mud and done well. It’s a fully sealed geared hubmotor system.

Rake is on our minds too. I think we might move to a custom fork soon.

Thanks for your comments!

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